1) Present

University of Aberdeen
Neil Hamilton - Child Health MediCAL

University of Dundee
Rosa Michaelson - FINESSE

University of Edinburgh (JCMB)
Charles Duncan - Remote Sensing                    Julian Newman - MANTCHI
Sandra Foubister - MANTCHI                        Jean Ritchie - UMI Coordinator
Antony Maciocia - SUMSMAN                      Kim Underwood - UMI Administrator

University of Glasgow
Margaret Brown - MANTCHI                        Paul Clark - SHEFC

Napier University (Sighthill)
Kirsty Davidson - SUMSMAN                       Tom Scott - SUMSMAN

University of Paisley
Ian MacLaren - Remote Sensing                     Neil Pitcher - SUMSMAN
John McQuillan - Remote Sensing

 
University of Strathclyde
Lorna Campbell - CVU                                 Niall Sclater - CVU
David McNicol - CVU                                  Dave Whittington - CVU

University of St Andrews
Collin Allison - FINESSE

2. Report from JR

2.1 JR had attended the meeting of the Scottish MANs vidoeconferencing network contacts (SMVCN) meeting on 15^th May; Jeremy Sharp (UKERNA) reported that he is preparing a case to put to SHEFC for a dataline, PC, projector to be installed in each videoconference studio.

2.2 Spoke at Univ of Wales colloquium on 21^st May. The Welsh participants had no equivalent of UMI, although they are developing MANs. They were particularly interested in details of the videoconferencing facilities.

2.3 Approached by Telespazio, an Italian Telecoms company, who are putting together a proposal for money from EU’s TEN-Telecom/2 programme (education and training applications). The URL is

http://www2.echo.lu/tentelecom/en/call198/genericservice.html

They are forming a consortium called GENESIS which plans to develop the market for Internet services in the education and training field; they want collaborators to develop content, which will then be marketed. Total money available for content development is 150 K ecus over 2 years; 100,000 pounds. They say 6 univs are interested at present. The money could be used to bundle material already produced by UMI projects, and make it marketable; UMI projects would have to indicate interest separately; figure out who the market was; and bundle accordingly. They would need to contact SHEFC to make sure it was happy for projects to do this. The draft proposal will be produced by Telespazio by Wednesday this week, then circulated and revised. It has to be with the Commission by 15^th June.

3. JR asked if UMI 2 projects had anything in particular they wanted to report. Projects had nothing new to report.

4. Dr Paul Clark, Scottish Higher Education Funding Council

4.1 PC started by saying that SHEFC is impressed with the work the UMI projects are doing.

4.2 SHEFC carried out a consultation exercise on C&IT policy with HEIs in Scotland, and found that four areas in C&IT need to be addressed:

• staff development
• further development and exploitation of web based tools
• piloting of intranets in Scotland
• infrastructure development

• infrastructure support - an advisory group recommended by HEIDS and the MANs consultative group will define needs of, eg. caching and network resilience. SHEFC plan to install mirrors/ caches at the MAN level, and also at a National level. The present network will have to be reprocured starting in 1999.

• staff development - SHEFC are putting together a discussion group to talk about staff development issues, needs and staff use of the network. SHEFC sees the next step in staff development as helping staff to become comfortable with using IT as part of normal teaching and learning

• SHEFC hope to build on the existing expertise in the area of MAN based teaching and learning

4.5 Questions and discussion

4.5.1 TS asked PC how much money will be involved in future MAN initiatives. PC said there were no figures available at the moment; figures could not be allocated until SHEFC had a clearer vision of what would be done. However, any money for future MAN initiatives would probably come from the Strategic Change Initiative funds, which make up 2% of SHEFC's spending budget (approximately 11 million pounds).

4.5.2 TS pointed out that people need to know how much money is available in order to effectively put together a proposal. PC said the amount of funding on offer would not be known until bids were asked for.

4.5.3 RM pointed out that in the past, timescales for submission of UMI project proposals have been quite short. PC said SHEFC will try to give reasonable time - probably three months. If SHEFC can get the bidding procedure out before the end of July, people will be given from July - October to submit their proposals.

4.5.4 CA was interested in the emphasis placed on resilience. SHEFC are not planning to tackle the upgrade of campus networks, but CA thought this was where lack of resilience was a problem, not at the MAN level. PC replied that SHEFC executive had taken the view that campus networks were the responsibility of individual HEIs.

4.5.5 MB pointed out that students are concerned about the resilience of the network. She also reported that many students see the use of web based resources as ‘distance learning’, and that they ‘had not come to University for distance learning’; there was a need for student, as well as staff, development.

4.5.6 JN pointed out that the user interface is important and more research was needed on this. PC agreed but said that SHEFC have to make sure they are spending money as recommend by the sector’s response to the C&IT consultation.

4.5.7 NH asked whether sites not already connected to the MAN would be connected in the future, and if so, would the funding for this come out of the same budget as the other initiatives. PC said that extension of the MANs might be funded, maybe as part of the reprocurement, but what budget it would come from was not at present known.

4.5.8 KD asked PC to explain what was meant by 'intranets' and asked whether web based tools can be used on them. PC said Dearing looked at intranets in the USA (eg Harvard Business School), and thought it was important that the UK carry out 5-6 intranet pilots. Intranets can be used by staff and students and allow access to institution teaching materials and administration materials; they can be used for posting lecture notes. Pilot studies will involve institutions sharing experiences in using intranets, and comparing software used on them etc. PC said that the two initiatives (web tools and intranet pilots) should work together.

5. Discussion on ATHENS (authentication system)

5.1 JR had discussed the ATHENS system with BK. BK had suggested that digital signatures, rather than the ATHENS system, may be a more suitable authentication system for UMI projects. He was taking a request based on the UMI project requirements to the meeting of the Advisory Committee of the World Wide Web Consortium on 24 - 25 June 1998.

5.2 CA is presently undertaking a feasibility study on ATHENS to see whether it could provide the same functionality for Finesse as the system that Finesse use at the moment. CA had received documentation on ATHENS, but not yet any software. Having read the documentation, he thought that the scope of what ATHENS can do seemed limited. He was interested to note that a Scottish server was about to be set up as he felt that relying on authentication from Bath was too risky. The cost of £2000/annum was also off-putting. At this stage, CA thinks there may be better options open to UMI projects. CA will put his feasibility study on the FINESSE web site when it is complete.
                                                                                                                        Action CA

5.3 JN said that MANTCHI need to make particular resources available to particular students at a particular time and so access permissions will be changed often. Would ATHENS support this? CA said that projects would need to add a system of user information on to ATHENS; CD pointed out that the EDINA project have to maintain user information records separately, and use them in conjunction with the ATHENS system. RM mentioned that ATHENS would be appropriate for a library but not so much for group teaching, peer rating, tutor feedback etc.

5.4 DW said that ATHENS was too expensive and CVU do not have enough time to transfer to it. They will stick to the authentication system they have already developed.

5.5 AM said ATHENS would be ideal for the SUMSMAN 'Mathpool' project so if two or three other projects were interested in adopting ATHENS, SUMSMAN would like to discuss this.

6. Points for discussion of Brian Kelly’s talk

6.1 JR had discussed indexing with BK; there may be a proposal from Dave Beckett of the Computing Laboratory, University of Kent, looking for funding. DB is interested in Dublin Core metatags. JR has emailed DB for more details.

6.2 BK and DB run a mailing list "for UK Web, WWW and Internet researchers to discuss UK specific issues, make announcements and communicate". The email address for this mailing list is:

web-research-uk@mailbase.ac.uk.

7. Subjects for future UMI meetings

7.1 The next UMI meeting would be on 15th June at the usual time of 11.05. JR asked for suggestions for external speakers at future UMI meetings and requested that people email the umi-info list if they had any requests.

7.2 AM asked PC if he would return to speak about the next round of funding for UMI projects at a future UMI meeting. PC agreed to do this.

8. AOB

8.1 JR mentioned the EU proposal, relating to the sale of web based teaching materials. JR said she would contact people by email if this looked promising.
                                                                                                                          Action JR

8.2 CD pointed out that the Telespazio proposal is based on their own satellite delivery system which is not as fast as the MANs and so may not be able to use materials designed for use on the MANs. The project would only deliver material across Telespazio’s network; however other networks were becoming available, to limiting the materials to this network might not be sensible. He was waiting for answers from Telespazio, but unless he was reassured on technical points, he was not interested in the proposal.